Now 26, he seems determined to present himself as a sweet-natured, shy boy who would any day prefer to be regarded as 'simple' rather than 'complicated'. He retreats from the question of any kind of self-analysis as if it's going to bite him. Journalists posing such standard questions as 'What sort of actor do you see yourself as?' have been met with a blunt 'Caucasian.

Four Nights in Knaresborough is the first play he has done for five years, and, like a wilfully difficult child, he insists that he can't remember the last one he did. 'I get the order he mixed up,' he says slowly. 'It could have been Entertaining Mr Sloane . . . yeah. That's what my dad reckons.'

He claims that he 'doesn't really go to the theatre,' then reveals that he can at least remember the last play he saw - 'Tis Pity She's a Whore!' he announces proudly, before adding, hesitantly, that 'it was, um, last week'.

Perhaps because of such evasion, he has been accused of being cold, aloof, arrogant - pretty much like Sick Boy, in fact, or the officer in Regeneration - which are, incidentally, his best performances. 'Jonny is elusive, kind and baffling,' his friend Sadie Frost adjudged when she was interviewed about him in Minx magazine.

Jake Scott, who directed Plunkett and Macleane, concurred: 'He put a lot of himself into Plunkett [an 18th-century highwayman]. The part required a mercurial character, someone who seemed to have it in their nature to change, to be irreverent, rebellious, slightly up-yours. But at the same time, gallant and with real charm. A bit of a double-edged sword . . . It takes a long time to get to know him.'

Acting is, indubitably, in his blood. His father, Alan Miller, was a stage actor who worked in production at the BBC, and his great-grandfather was a music hall performer. Most famously of all, and most handily for the Sean Connery 'impershonashions' in Trainspotting, his grandfather, Bernard Lee, played M in the first 12 Bond films. Rather suavely, he slips effortlessly into describing how he told Sean Connery this when they met at the BAFTAs. 'He said: "Ahh, yesshhhh. Most intereshting,"' Jonny grins, enjoying himself at last.

Despite his rather naïve Cockney wide-boy-isms, Lee Miller grew up in Kingston upon Thames, leaving Tiffin Boys' School at 16 'to get a job in a café' before accepting acting as his fate. At 17, he was ushering at London's Drury Lane Theatre, and auditioning for 'bits of telly' during the day. (He popped up in series such as Goodbye Cruel World, Between the Lines, and Prime Suspect III).

Ewan McGregor tells the story of the time he came down from Scotland to audition for RADA when he was 17, only to be told: 'Ah, well, you've got a few years of auditioning ahead of you yet.' 'Excuse me. I don't bloody well think so!' McGregor said, as cocky then as he is now.

'Nah, I wasn't like that,' mutter Lee Miller, sounding like a bashful child, almost overwhelmed by the experience of even hearing about someone with so much swagger. 'I'd have probably said, "Yeah! You're right!" Then I'd have thought of something really smart or really tough to say later.'

In a way, the path that their careers have taken reflect the differing characters he, McGregor and Robert Carlyle played in Trainspotting. Like Sick Boy's, his has been much cooler and less showy. After Trainspotting he went to Hollywood to make Hackers and became almost a recluse, hiding from the hype over here while McGregor and Carlyle cleaned up.

'Trainspotting opened a lot of doors in Hollywood,' he says, but most of them were only offering variations of Sick Boy. Unlike Sick Boy, he spent most of his time just saying no.

In March 1996, he married the flamboyant Jolie (only 20 at the time) . Until her recent success in movies such as Gia and Pushing Tin, she was most renowned for salacious interviews in which she talked of her appetite 'for every type of drug there is', her proclivities for S&M and lesbian sex games, and antics such as drawing Lee Miller's name on a white silk shirt in her own blood. 'She can be a little crazy, but she's mellowed quite a bit,' he says, perhaps disappointingly.

The fact that he walked up the aisle wearing all-black leather is rather tame by comparison with his wife, but, given the way he is today, now seems positively depraved. They drifted apart, he says, partly because Jolie wanted to move to New York, while he wanted to move back to London, because he 'missed things like the Nine O'Clock News and red buses'.

The experience means Hollywood 'is not an ambition anymore', although it strikes you that even the couple of films he has done over there seem almost determinedly low-key. He admits that, although he has auditioned for a few blockbusters (Batman and Robin and Star Wars among them), 'in retrospect, I'm quite glad I didn't get them; I wouldn't like having my face on a packet of crisps.' He says he'd 'think twice' about taking the play Four Nights . . . into a bigger West End theatre.

The prospect of greater fame makes him so anxious, he is already weighing up the way he gets to work. 'It only takes a couple of people to make the Tube journey awkward. I'm only three stops on the tube, so by the time anyone susses anything out, I'm getting out anyway,' he declares, politely ignoring the fact that I didn't recognise him at all when I arrived. (I saw a couple of people who mistook his for the boy who plays Steve MacDonald in Coronation Street. Or possibly thought he could have been a really handsome version of Frank Skinner.)

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